


One Last Tender Place

by kyrilu



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Breathplay, Drunk Sex, Implied Character Death, Knifeplay, M/M, Minor Character Death, Murder, Non-Graphic Violence, POV Second Person, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-08
Updated: 2013-02-08
Packaged: 2017-11-28 16:10:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/676322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrilu/pseuds/kyrilu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hesperus is Phosphorus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Last Tender Place

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to constantinflux, who encouraged me to post this despite my ‘ah second person POV’ doubts. <3

You spend the morning polishing your Walther PPK, running cloth over the muzzle until you get the bloodstains out. You are still in bed, a bottle of scotch on the bedside table, and you’re pissed -- you’ve been pissed the entire night and even now, but you’re so used to the pulsing of a hangover that you barely feel it.

He is sleeping quietly beside you as if he doesn’t hear the _shhh_ of fabric over gun metal. It’s fucking cocky of him, but, you suppose, there’s a thin blade secreted in a pocket of flesh in his jaw, in the prosthetic. He showed you the knife after the second fuck, as if it’s a challenge. He showed you: _I have the means to cut you._ You just laughed, grinned, and let him bring you up against the wall.

Today, you do not stir much in bed. If you wanted to, you could make noise, and he’d wake. You’d fuck again, and maybe slowly, bringing yourself out of the haze of alcohol and drowsiness. He would hiss more challenges; he would slide a tongue across your teeth and pretend he is doing you a favour.

It’s a long game that you play.

The Walther is a steady weight in your hand. You reach for your clothes and begin to dress. Then you fit the gun into the holster, shifting your undershirt so that it hides the marks on the stretch of skin around and under your neck. You are ready to go.

You throw him a backward glance as you leave. If he was the one leaving, he’d blow you a mocking kiss, but you merely leave a martini at his side.

 

*

 

Gin, vodka, and Kina Lillet. He laughs when you mixed it in front of him once, because he knew exactly what it is. You drag your mouth against his, then, the drink acrid and burning on the tip of your tongue, which is strange, because you think, _I thought it would be like drowning._

He closes his hands around your wrists, brings your fingers to his mouth, and your smile twists with an emotion you cannot identify. It’s not softness, though, it’s not sentimentality; it is animalistic and jagged on the edges and you grind your hips against his.

 

*

 

He knows that you like explosions, so he spreads fire across the continents, a trail for you to follow. In return, the spent bullets empty from your guns, almost in tandem with their corpses; in return, he pulls you onto your knees and gives you his cock.

He knows you like explosions know you.

 

*

 

 _James, James, James_ , he calls you, cupping a hand underneath your jaw, and this is a gesture you cannot return. He looks at you with warm eyes, and speaks coaxing promises about his empire, but you are silent. This is your long game, and this is not the first time he gives out vows like they’re simple _._

For example: you take a bullet, a rip of silver against your suit and your skin. On your arm, there’s a blemish, and on your arm, there is blood. You try not to pass out, applying pressure to the damned thing, and all the while you realise who sent the gunman to you.

This gunman is dressed in white. This gunman has a blood-red handkerchief in his pocket. The same colour of _his_ stupid flashy car that he pulls you into, where you fuck in the back seat like you’re teenagers; where he finds his own eyes in the rearview mirror, and that’s vanity, that’s him looking at himself and at you. The same colour of the wine he spills across his fingers and holds it for you to lap up; the same colour of hotel curtains and ties and in summation, his favourite colour.

(Even though he will never admit to a favourite _anything_ out loud.)

“Thank you, Mr. Silva,” you say between shallow breaths, a low hum from the back of your throat.

You close your eyes against the slam of oblivion. There is a burst behind your eyelids -- something like the stir of a memory. Something like an evening star. And you laugh, and you laugh, and you realise that you are nothing but fragmentary, blue eyes and Walther PPKs and something left behind in the snow.

 

*

 

So you wake to his hand on your cheek. He calls you an idiot. You’re in a hotel, half-naked on a bed, and he sits on the foot of the bed, eyes bright and taunting.

You bite your tongue to stop yourself from saying, _No, you._ Instead you throw him a crooked grin, the one you know he hates. “Have anything to drink?” you ask nonchalantly, and you pretend you don’t hear Q on your earpiece telling you about the bomb MI6 agents have placed in one of armouries.

He snaps a finger at the one bodyguard by the door, and the man puts a glass of _water_ by your bedside. Then the bodyguard leaves, shutting the door behind him.

“Fuck you,” you say, but you down the glass anyway. “Christ. I want something stronger.”

“You want so many things, Mr. Bond,” he says, and he probably thinks that he’s being clever. “Spoilt brat. MI6 really lets you run wild, hmm?”

“Into fires, oceans, deserts, and your arms,” you drawl, and then you mouth: _boom._

 

*

 

He looks at you, understanding finally dawning on his face. “James,” he says, and uses your first name like a warning.

You touch the bandage on your arm in response. Because you and him are even now, but the scales must be tipped, and MI6’s orders are orders. You are even because you didn’t plunge the knife into the right place that will kill him: at the slice of skin near his heart, his vital organs. You had cut at him minutely, only enough to make him sink to his knees, and then you ran to M and looked at him with burning eyes.

“Well, then,” you say, arms outstretched, “have at me.” And you wait for him to slide the hidden knife from his jaw, which you’ll endure, which you’ll take.

“It’s not that easy,” he breathes against your mouth, not quite closing the distance. “This is not how it should go, my love.”

Deja vu. He traces that old scar on your chest, and something beckons at you to find the scar at the small of his back: that one is yours. But you don’t reach for it. You only study him, your expression unperturbed. And then his hand finds your arm, tip-tapping at the fresh wound, and it doesn’t hurt, not really, but you suck in a quick breath when his fingernails brush against it.

“The bullet is out,” he tells you.

“Do you expect a thank you?” you say, eyebrows arched. “You put it there in the first place.”

“Mm, no,” he says. “I don’t attribute that many manners to you, James. But you could always, ah--” now, his thumb drags around a nipple, “--start screaming.”

“Not this soon, Mr. Silva.” And your eyes are half-closed, lulled by the sensation of his hands on your skin. “I don’t scream. You know that.”

“No, you don’t,” he says thoughtfully. “Although you spread your legs well. And I suppose you think you’re terribly _brave._ Lying back for your beloved England.”

And you’re fucking impatient. The heat is there, on the surface, a tension that brings you sliding so close to the edge. You would beg, but that’s terribly unflattering. So you sit there, and try to take in whatever feeling you can: the scratches of his nails on your chest, the _007 007 007 007_ mimed on your shoulders.

You finally give in and say, “Your point, Mr. Silva?”

“So scream for me,” he concludes, reaching up, and you hear the _snickt_ of a blade retracting.

 

*

 

You don’t scream. The glass of water is knocked from the bedside, shards gleaming on the ground, and you wonder how the glass would feel underneath your skin. Perhaps like him.

He leaves you when you’re asleep. Curled against him, hurting nearly everywhere, and you think you remember a brief touch on your forehead, and then he’s gone.

The cuts and bruises sting, and you’d kill for a proper drink. Your throat is parched. Your mouth tastes like blood and come and metal, and you swipe your tongue across your lips, sampling it, and then you spit on the soiled bed sheets.

You dress, twining your tie around your neck. You feel the weight of it there, and tug gently.

It isn’t -- it’s isn’t as good, not nearly, but the reminder of not-breathing holds you still for a moment, at the mirror. And something lights in your eyes, like a morning star.

 

*

 

He keeps track of your sins with invisible tally marks on your back and you shudder against his teeth, as his mouth makes undecipherable patterns, and crosses over, marking the fives. It’s this time that you turn him over and fuck him; it’s a surprise that he allows you this, and he calls you _my love_ , and it’s that bitterness, that jaggedness, that awakens in you again. But it all ends in a sort of satisfaction, because he murmurs _it’s okay it’s okay_ against your cheek, and so it must be, in some way.

M (Mallory, your mind keeps interrupting, but it’s his title now) tells you later, _You can stop. You can bring him in. You can kill him._

Not exactly in those words, but your fingers flick at your trouser legs, and you say, “But that won’t be fun now, wouldn’t it?”

“007,” M says, sharp. “Finish off Silva -- get the job done. You owe my predecessor that much.”

You start. Because he is what is left of her; because you are what is left of her. You are the two rats and the world has been eaten because of you both.

But you say, “Yes, sir.”

 

*

 

He knows your orders, and he asks you if you’re going to be his Vesper.

“What do you think, Mr. Silva?” you say. Somewhere another one of his armouries explode, and then a safe house, and then another safe house. The last is located only a block away, and the force of it shakes the building. And you say, “It’s not exactly the same set of circumstances.”

“It’s not completely different, either,” he says, shrugging off his suit coat. And he nods his head to the sound of the blast, like it’s music, like it’s a song he knows the words to.

You chuckle at the pure nerve of him, but you start to loosen your tie. Your gun is still in its holster. He says he likes the weight of it against his prick.

 

*

 

And this is where someone bursts through the door, and he takes your gun and fires, barely breaking his gaze from the hollow of your throat. You don’t know who the man is: an enemy of his, a MI6 agent, or a hired assassin, except now he’s a cooling corpse on the floor, and Raoul Silva still wants to fuck you.

He puts a bottle of scotch in your hand and motions you to drink it, and you do, the alcohol warm and rough and burning at the pit of your stomach. Then you crash against him, mouth and chests and hips, and you’re _hard_ , really fucking hard.

 

*

 

It’s early in the morning, and you and him are naked and raw.

“Well, James?” he says. “Come with me.” He cranes his head so that he can nip softly at the stretch of your throat, nuzzling at you. Maybe it’s teasing or maybe he’s starting to make a new scar. “We could do so much together. And I’d prefer that you stop blowing up my strongholds.”

The dead body is still there. You look at it grimly, then close your eyes, feel his teeth.

“No, open your eyes,” he coaxes you, and you listen to him. “Blue,” he says. “Perfect blue.” As if he doesn’t see the dark circles there, bloody bastard _._

“I’m tired,” you say in a sudden burst of almost honesty. “I’m tired.”

He presses against you, fitting you into the curve of his body. He doesn’t say a word.

Your fingers move to catch his jaw, prying at skin, and you offer him the knife, handle out.


End file.
